Re: ni, jei, perfectionism

[And Rosta <a.rosta@UCLAN.AC.UK>]

> >> That is the case, as I understand it.  Perhaps sometime I will ask McIvor
> >> (Cowan's parallel inthe TLI community, who is more sympathetic to us
> >> than JCB is) to be sure.
> >
> >It would be instructive to learn what they do. Do they generally
> >take logicosemantic issues less seriously and more fudgily?
>
> Would you like to judge for yourself?  I can forward some glossed
> text to you. They have some l logic types that apparently talk about
> the same kinds of things that you do, though entirely behind the
> scenes.  But the actual text generated tends to look like a parody
> of logic-talk, though sometimes I admit to being forced into such
> hilarity by their lujvo-metaphors that I have trouble seeing the
> logic past my laughter.

If you happen to have any samples of the parody of logic-talk,
I wouldn't mind seeing them, since I myself feel Lojban might be
the better for a bit more of that sort of thing.

> I can bundle up several texts with the glosses they provide, and let
> you tale a look.  Though maybe you already are seeing it,s ince you
> say thatthey are producing more text than we are in Lojban.  (Actually,
> ONE PERSON is producing more text than we are, and so far as I know, no one
> else in the entire TLI community is even trying.)

I haven't really bothered studying the loglan texts closely. I
don't know enough of the cmavo, and it would take too much time.
I would like to listen in on those behind the scenes logic
discussions, though.

> >Sometimes there is ambiguity and sometimes there isn't; only
> >some types of subordinate interrogatives are confusable with
> >free relatives. "I'll see what she saw" is ambiguous, but
> >"I'll see who she saw" isn't.
>
> It is not that there is ambiguity.  Most idioms in English are not all that
>  ambiguous, but merely make no particular sense in the context if taken
>  literally.

I presume that you are claiming that subordinate interrogatives
are in fact free relatives that are "idiomatically" or
non-literally construed as indirect questions. That is a
sensible claim, IMO, but is not supported by the facts
(viz. not all subordinate interrogative clauses have free
relative counterparts).

> I think that what I am calling "idiomatic" use of indirect
> questions for non-subordinate interrogatives are misleading because
> they suggestthat there really is a question when there is not - at
> most it is a structure that reflects the speaker's lack of
> knowledge of the value of the sumti, or desire to notexpress it at
> that point.  I am wary of having all the sorts of things that
> English uses indirect questions for transferred into indirect
> questions in LOjban, when there is no real question.  I am curious
> as to how non-SAE languages deal with these things.  Robin and
> Veijo?  Are you reading this?

I think I understand your point. You don't want us to blindly
use Q-kau wherever English uses a subordinate interrogative.

If I understand you right, then I wholly agree. If we want
to express a given meaning, such as one where English uses a
subordinate interrogative, we should try to establish its
meaning in explicit logical terms, and then see what resources
Lojban provides us with to encode that logical meaning.

BTW, use of subordinate interrogatives is cross-linguistically
pretty widespread. Which would follow, if, as I contend,
main clause interrogatives are semantically a subtype of the
subordinate variety.

> >> So what is "literature" in Lojban.  At this point, it is anything
> >> written, generally of longer than a single sentence, used to communicate
> >> rather than as an example in argumentation.  I am not a snob that says that
> >>  has to be good to be literature.
> >
> >You said: most lojban text is translation, and indirect questions
> >don't come up much in literature. The only obvious implication
> >of that is that you were saying that most lojban text is
> >translated from foreign literature, in which indirect questions
> >do not occur very much. That implication is what I dispute.
>
> Only arguing based on what I have seen.  We have little in the way of large
> texts in Lojban, but there is Saki's Open Window, Ivan's Story of the Stairs,
> and Colin's Princess and the Pea besides Nick's and Jorge's writings.  The
> first two predate kau.  Since Saki is a readily available text, perhaps you
> can find indirect questions in it that were not translatedinto Lojban?
> Or choose some other piece of prose literature and tell us how many
> indirect questions there are in say 10 pages of text (which owuld encompass
> a significant percentage of Lojban text if translated).

Is the English text of Saki available online? I'd be willing to
take a look.

As to scanning 10 pages of text, I have instead scanned the
text by you preceded in this message by a single >.

I found 3 "indirect questions", one a NP and two subordinate
interrogatives:

> knowledge of the value of the sumti, or desire to notexpress it at
               ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> I am curious as to how non-SAE languages deal with these things.
                     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> tell us how many
          ^^^^^^^^

So on that somewhat arbitrarily chosen sample they would seem to
be reasonably frequent.

--And